A bold new computer metaphor

I mean, there've been umpteen user-interface revolutions and revisions since the
dawn of the personal-computer age, almost all of them obviously improvements.

Mac OS, at the very least, makes a computer as easy to use as you could reasonably
expect, right?

You hardly ever need to crank a
handle to start your car any
more! And
tyres
only blow out about once every 200 miles! What more could you possibly want?

Fortunately, I've got a better metaphor for the current state of computer usability
than the car one, which has been the Lazy IT Writer's Friend since a "home computer"
took up a large room and quintupled your power bill.

Let's, instead, consider that weird old phrase "computer literacy", these days seldom
used except by the hardy souls teaching Windows to the elderly. Let's compare computer
literacy with ordinary literacy. Reading and writing.

In this respect, I think you can make a case that computer technology has made it
to the late sixth century AD, at best.

In the olden days, you see, the upper classes were able to read and write, but they
generally preferred not to. They left it to people who had to do it, like scribes
and clergymen.

(Look at the terms "clerk" and, even more obviously, "clerical"; it's a straight
line from them back to the religious clerics who used to spend their lives reading and
writing and shuffling parchment. Or only beating up monsters in dungeons with un-edged
weapons, depending on your personal view of history.)

There were two reasons why people didn't read for pleasure back then.

One was that there simply wasn't a lot of stuff to read for pleasure. Before
the printing press, before even affordable paper, stuff to read for fun was pretty
thin on the ground. It was like the computer-game scene in 1970.

There was a much bigger reason why people didn't read for pleasure back then, though,
and it ties right in with the usability, or lack thereof, of computers today.

Because of the way people wrote back then, reading was really bloody
difficult.

One kind of early writing system gave you whole words more or less as we know them
today, but no spaces between them - "scripta continua". (Classical
Chinese has no spaces, either, which can cause trouble even with
tiny strings of characters, in addition to the problems
that non-alphabetical scripts always have.)

It was quite possible - common, even - for early writing in European languages to
have no vowels, and no spaces. Plus, if you were really lucky, incomprehensible
shorthand symbols as well.

The reasons for all this were simple enough. The only material you could make a book
out of back then was parchment,
which was made from animal hides, and not cheap. Countries within trading range of Egypt
used papyrus before anybody figured
out how to make parchment, but papyrus is too fragile to be bound into a book, so a
large papyrus document has to be a cumbersome
scroll. Parchment displaced papyrus
almost entirely by about 1000 AD.

When your "paper" was expensive and/or delicate and hard to manage in quantity, the
more text you could pack into a small area, the better. Leaving out spaces and vowels
helped with this, as did the various schools of shorthand symbols. These early "compression"
techniques also made it easier for scribes to take dictation.

If you wrote modern English this way, then even without weird symbols, "hello world"
would compress into "HLLWRLD" (lower-case hadn't been invented yet, either). The reader
would then have to figure out from context what it was actually meant to mean.

"Hollow railed"? "Hill war led"? "Halal ower lode"?

OK, that last one's pushing it. But you get the idea.

(And yes, since you ask, this sort of thing does indeed have some bearing on the
translation of religious scripture into modern languages. Not only can there be disagreement
about the meaning of known words - look at the arguments over whether Moses' face became
radiant after he met with God, or whether he
GREW HORNS - but there
can in fact be enormous differences in the words you end up with after adding vowels
and spaces to old texts.)

Decoding this sort of compressed text was no fun at all. No wonder rich folk who
wanted to read scholarly works or plays or epic poetry or whatever for fun usually hired someone to read to them.

Today, of course, not many people have staff who take care of their computers. But
if they could have an in-house computer technician, the average user would probably very much like one.

I mean, just look at a perfectly unremarkable Windows XP error:

"Cannot delete [filename]: It is being used by another person or program."

Now, you may have no trouble figuring out that this is just because you opened
a file from that directory in a program, and even though the file is now closed the
dumb program, which is still running, is still locking the directory, so you probably have to close that program
or zap a
process or something and then you'll be able to delete the folder.

But if you know that, you figured it out over a long period of trial and error. Someone who doesn't
spend 15 hours a day voluntarily staring at a screen could quite reasonably think
that the "another person" bit had something to do with hackers,
or other family members who use the same computer.

Windows Vista, of course, has completely fixed this problem. It gives you a
much larger requester that
says "The action can't be completed because the folder is open in another program. Close
the folder and try again."

Well, at least it doesn't allude to "another person" lurking around your computer.
It still doesn't say "there's a file in this folder that is open in [NAME OF PROGRAM,
FOR PETE'S SAKE], and I can't delete the folder until that program lets go of the file",
though.

All of us experts may know that the computer won't call the cops about an "illegal
operation", and that Russian criminals and the NCIS can't access everything on your
computer via a nifty
animated
interface like they do
on TV. But stuff like
this jams itself into the face of ordinary users all the time, breaking their concentration
and demoralising them. It's like trying to read a book whose text LKSLKTHS.

Dozens of confusingly-named
models of video card.
Hard drives that die with no warning. The thousand and one bizarre symptoms a bad power
supply can cause. Pop-up ads that offer to install an anti-virus program, and then install
a virus. The list of jobs that're the computing equivalent of adjusting six two-barrel
Webers on your 1961 Ferrari
goes on and on.

(Just when you think you've escaped the car metaphor, back it comes!)

Computers aren't really in the hands of a priesthood any more. Big serious systems
are still likely to be tended by religious orders of sysadmins and coders, but ordinary
people all over the world have, and love, personal computers.

But those ordinary people are also likely to be part of a zombie
botnet, and to be accustomed to their
work and precious data just... "going away" from time to time.

You should be able to instruct a computer in natural language and get back information
that's as easy to understand as that particular information could ever be. You shouldn't
have to remember to make backups, or know anything at all about "codecs", or have to
pick your new video card from a long list full of similarly-named cards, half of which
are lousy cut-down models.

It is, undeniably, now a heck of a lot easier to use a computer than it was 25 years
ago. You can do a heck of a lot more with it, too.

But just you wait until computer technology makes it to the Renaissance.